“Farewell, then, dearest lady, but let it be no tragical or eternal parting, since your fine house in the Rue de Touraine will doubtless be honoured with your presence some day. You have only to open a salon there in order to be the top of the mode. Some really patrician milieu is needed to replace the antique court of the dear old Marquise, and to extinguish the Scudéry, whose Saturdays grow more vulgar every week. Yes, you will come to Paris, bringing that human lily, Mrs. Angela, in your train; and I promise to make you the fashion before your house has been open a month. The wits and Court favourites will go where I bid them. And though your dearest friend, Madame de Longueville, has retired from the world in which she was more queenly than the Queen, you will find Mademoiselle de Montpensier as faithful as ever to mundane pleasures, and, after having refused kings and princes, slavishly devoted to a colonel of dragoons who does not care a straw for her. “Louise de Bourbon, a woman who can head a revolt and fire a cannon, would think no sacrifice too great for a cold-hearted schemer like Lauzun—yet you who swore you loved me, when the coach was waiting that would have carried me to paradise, and made us one for all this life, could suffer a foolish girl to separate us in the very moment of triumphant union. You were mine, Hyacinth; heart and mind were consenting, when your convent-bred sister surprised us, and all my hopes of bliss expired in a sermon. And now I can but say, with that witty rhymester, whom everybody in London quotes— ‘Love in your heart as idly burns, As fire in antique Roman urns.’ “Good-bye, which means ‘God be with you.’ I know not if the fear of Him was in your mind when you sacrificed your lover to that icy abstraction women call virtue. The Romans had but one virtue, which meant the courage that dares; and to me the highest type of woman would be one whose bold spirit dared and defied the world for love’s sake. These are the women history remembers, and whom the men who live after them worship. Cleopatra, Mary Stuart, Diana of Poictiers, Marguerite de Valois, la Chevreuse, la Montbazon! Think you that these became famous by keeping their lovers at a distance? “‘Go, lovely rose!’ “How often I have sung those lines, and you have listened, and nothing has come of it; except time wasted, smiles, sighs, and tears, that ever promised, and ever denied. Beauty, too choice to be kind, adieu! “DE MALFORT.”